Wednesday, January 09, 2008

We've got McCain on tape

Dear automat,

John McCain may be feeling good about his victory in New Hampshire's primary last night, but you can bet video clips like this one from the campaign trail will come back to haunt him:

Can you believe it? Just last week, one of our organizers was at a town hall meeting for John McCain in Derry, New Hampshire. When an audience member asked him what he thought about President Bush's plan to keep troops in Iraq for 50 years, McCain answered, "make it a hundred."

This is why I love my job - this video was shot by Alexis, one of our "trackers" for the Democratic Party. Every day, trackers like Alexis travel from campaign event to campaign event, quietly filming the Republican presidential candidates and posting it online.

Republicans are so dissatisfied with their field of candidates, they can't make up their mind. That means we have to spend more time covering more people than we have before. That's why I'm asking you to help keep the Democratic Party's trackers and organizers on the ground.

Will you keep the Republican candidates on the record with a donation?

During the whole course of the campaign, McCain lost ground among independents over his stubborn promise to deliver a third Bush term on the war in Iraq. On this video, McCain makes that promise again. He not only interrupted a voter's question telling him we should "make it a hundred" years in Iraq and "that would be fine with me," he told a reporter after the event that U.S. troops could be in Iraq for 'a thousand years' or 'a million years,' as far as he was concerned."

That's why we originally hired people to track candidates in Iowa - and now that the caucuses are over we thought we'd have to lay them off.

But thanks to the 50-State Strategy and support from Democrats like you, they're still hard at work, making sure we keep catching everything the Republicans say on the campaign trail.

The more donations that we receive, the more employees we can keep on staff as we head into the general election. That means more tracking videos, more doors knocked and more calls made when the election heats up.

We're getting results. Just look at last night's results. Democrats showed up 2 to 1 over Republicans in Iowa, and New Hampshire saw a shortage of ballots in some locations because so many folks were voting in the our Party's primary.

The tracker's work isn't very glamorous - but it's important. Can you help keep people like Alexis in the field?